Google DNI, a European-wide fund that is geared towards supporting innovation journalism and the media, has provided €48,000 in funding for the team to explore how dedicated sensor kits could provide rich data for journalism.

With partners spanning engineering and journalism, and with supporting partners such as the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and journalism.co.uk, SenseMaker will design and develop dedicated journalism sensor kits that respond to, reveal, or add value to, local issues via co-creation and user-centred design. It will test the premise that by co-creating data collection tools, with a high level of sensor and engineering capability, our prototypes will be highly relevant and suitable for journalists and their communities.

Our outputs will include novel and highly relevant connected sensing kits; rich multimedia content generated from collected data; data visualisations; explorations into scalable hardware development and legitimate use cases and commercialisation opportunities across the entire product development pipeline.

The sensor prototypes could sense pollution, biometric data, thermal imagery, noise, infrared and audio information and the resulting datasets will prompt novel and compelling editorial responses; enabling citizens and journalists to work together in creating compelling content, or independently verifying official/third party data.